Last year, during a crackdown on spoofing — a form of high-speed computer trading fraud — federal prosecutors charged a Chicago software developer with creating a program that helped a rogue trader net millions in illegal gains.

On Tuesday, after his recent trial ended in a hung jury, all charges were dismissed against Jitesh Thakkar.

“We are grateful that the government has finally recognized that Jitesh Thakkar is innocent,” defense attorney Renato Mariotti said Tuesday.

Thakkar, 42, of Naperville, was charged last year with conspiracy and aiding and abetting the notorious British “flash crash” trader Navinder Sarao in a multiyear scheme. Sarao made $40 million over six years trading E-Mini S&P 500 futures through the CME before pleading guilty in 2017 to federal charges of spoofing and wire fraud, according to court documents.

Spoofing floods the market with bogus large orders to temporarily trigger price swings. The spoof orders are canceled before they are filled, with the trader placing a real order on the opposite side of the market at a better price.

In 2011, Thakkar’s small Chicago-based consulting firm, Edge Financial Technologies, developed a customized program that enabled Sarao to more successfully spoof the markets. Thakkar’s firm designed and refined a “back-of-the-book” function that all but guaranteed the spoof orders would never be filled, according to court documents.

Sarao paid Thakkar’s firm $24,200 for the software.

In May 2010, Sarao’s spoof trading with another developer’s software caused equity markets to plunge — the so-called flash crash — temporarily wiping out billions of dollars in wealth and making the practice a focus for federal regulators.

Hoping to get a reduced sentence, Sarao testified at Thakkar’s trial that the software developer “created a computer program for me which made it more efficient for me to spoof the market.”

The majority of jurors were unconvinced, resulting in a hung jury on April 9.

While several financial traders, including Sarao, have been convicted of spoofing, Thakkar was the first software developer to be tried under a 2010 federal anti-spoofing law.